Not two weeks after American voters handed historic victories in
Congress and state capitals to Republicans who pledged to the last
man to block the Obama agenda, President Obama said this of the
newly empowered opposition party: “They are flush with victory
after a campaign of just saying ‘No.’ But I’m sure the American
people did not vote for more gridlock.”
Alas, Things of Which Obama Is Sure and
Things That Are True seldom overlap. If the American
people’s collective hopes on November 2 could be distilled into a
single word, it would be “gridlock.”
A CNN/Opinion Research poll the week after the election
asked, “Do you think the Republican victories in the House races
are more of a mandate for Republican policies or more a rejection
of Democratic policies?” Seventy percent picked “rejection of
Democratic policies.” Exit polling showed that 60 percent of voters
said the country was going in the wrong direction and almost three
quarters disapproved of the job Congress was doing.
Regarding politicians, when one loses between two-thirds
and three-fourths of the country, one tends to cling to one’s empty
rhetorical platitudes to explain one’s frustrations. And so the
president who spent months before the election oversaturating the
nation’s airports and airwaves to sell his agenda said he intends
to start “getting outside Washington and shaping public
opinion.”
The president also went out of his way to scold (because
that’s what he does) the flush-with-victory Republicans by telling
them, “campaigning is different than governing.” When it came to
his own administration, however, Obama thought he could overcome
that axiom with speeches. He is as English historian Thomas
Macaulay said of the Constitution — “all sail and no anchor.” He
governs with wind, most of it blowing from his own lungs, all of it
created to push the country rapidly away from its moorings. By
contrast, the American people prefer a less jarring voyage. Obama’s
failure to understand this continues to lead him into dangerous
waters.
Two years ago, the people craved change. But they didn’t
want to change their country; they wanted to change their
government. They demanded a government that was open, honest,
accountable and trustworthy, and which would actually fix broken
things and leave everything else alone. Obama seemed to offer all
of that. Now, after two years under his governance, America knows
better.
This November’s elections were not merely an expression of
frustration with the pace of recovery, as the president claims and
apparently believes. They were a rebuttal to Obama’s argument that
every facet of American life requires “comprehensive
reform.”
Obama fails to understand this because he fails to
understand his own country. Nothing better illustrates this failure
than his predicting (of presidential psychoanalysis to come)
“bitter clingers” quote from 2008:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a
lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for
25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each
successive administration has said that somehow these communities
are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising
then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy
to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or
anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations.”
Since he spoke those words to a room full of San Francisco
liberals two years ago, what in Obama’s attitude is different?
Nothing of significance, save the possibility that he has become
even more detached and disdainful since his elevation to the
presidency. Obama’s analysis of the American people is unchanged:
Collectively ignorant, their political actions are dictated by
irrational fear born of economic hardship.
Obama views American reluctance to stray from tradition,
sacrifice individual liberty, and undermine institutional stability
as nothing more than mindless superstition to be overcome by
superior reason and logic. Therefore, the country is to be educated
out of its prejudices by the enlightened (him). In fact, he sees
Americans as so fundamentally ignorant about even their own
behavior that he can — and must — explain to them that by
removing Nancy Pelosi from her speakership, they were really
expressing their desire that the House cooperate with
him.
The public has no idea what a service it’s done by
electing Republicans to thwart this president. Protest as we might,
he would never have slowed the cruise toward his Euro-Utopian
fantasyland. Our only hope was to mutiny and drop anchor. We have
done that, for now, provided the GOP doesn’t falter.
Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire
Union Leader. His Twitter ID is Drewhampshire.
